


James 1:12-16

by dissembler



Category: Vespers (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Blasphemy, M/M, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Fantasy, Uneven Age and Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:34:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25398505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: A little before vespers, Matteo thinks of Lucca and, God help him, Lucca appears.
Relationships: Matteo/Lucca
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	James 1:12-16

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reine_des_corbeaux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/gifts).



> I played Vespers in a furious haze early in quarantine and it stuck with me. I hope you like this fic that took a darker turn than intended! 
> 
> Content warnings in the endnote!
> 
> And thanks to my beta, as ever.

When Matteo had been a child, years before his being sent as oblate to St. Cuthberts, he had had a beloved blanket of white fur that was gifted him at birth. In the dark nights of northern winters he had cleaved to it, felt safe only beneath it, had taken it as a protector that in his child’s mind was equal to and some nights perhaps greater than God. He had grown out of this clinging need, this quasi-blasphemy, by the time he had attained the age for oblation; but he remembers it now, his blanket echoes to him, under his eye once more as the peaceful expanse of snow over the dead grass. Winters past at St. Cuthberts had not brought this to his mind, but this one, with the snow lying undisturbed, unblemished by footfall, as Matteo feels death creeping closer, does. In natural life the man begins and ends infirm and grasping; perhaps it is a fitting substitute to that symmetry that this man should begin and end with a blanket of white.

Of course, even to think of that is to sin; man does not decide man’s end, that is the province of the Father. But knowing this does not make Matteo less tired, it does not lift his spirits; now, just as at the setting of the sun in his infancy, the thought of a blanket gives him more comfort than the thought of God. 

For God is gone from St. Cuthberts, Matteo understands this: He has abandoned this place as He has abandoned Italy, as He has abandoned all His children, and He will not return whilst the ones who are left here still live. And how long will that take? Matteo does not count himself among those yet living, his mind is made up, but Constantin stinks of the plague, and no wonder; Ignatius, working with no success at the infirmary, is strong but there is a wrongness about him; Drogo and the Abbot are mad, the Devil flits and flirts around them; and Lucca… Lucca is so young, so alive. Lucca is a pure, delicate thing in a cruel, hard world; between the plague and the Devil and his minions within these walls, without Matteo, how long can such a boy survive? 

Lucca, Lucca, Lucca. _Beatus vir qui suffert tentationem: quoniam cum probatus fuerit, accipiet coronam vitæ, quam repromisit Deus diligentibus se._ For weeks now, alone in his bed, Matteo has been sent visions of Lucca. Visions which upon waking leave him shamed and not strengthened, ignored by rather than closer to God. Visions that he hopes come not from himself but from the Devil. Visions of Lucca’s mouth, his hands – Matteo must not think of it, has put up buttresses against it, he cannot cheapen Lucca by even thinking of him so debauched, however much he wishes to– 

He starts as footsteps reach the top of the tower steps, and for a moment he forgets and sends his thoughts as prayer up to God but then he turns to see Lucca, palms up before him.

“ _Pax_ , Brother,” Lucca says. “ _Pax_.” And before all this, had Lucca managed to startle Matteo, they would be laughing. Not so now, Lucca’s face is pale and drawn ( _still lovely_ , his own voice whispers in his mind, hissing close to the fence Matteo cowers behind, ( _still young and sweet and willing_ ). He puts his hands down, fidgeting with the sleeves of his mantle, and says, quiet: “It is almost vespers, Matteo.”

Matteo presses his eyes closed and turns back to the railing, watching as the sickly orange light of the sun finally fades and leaves them in the weak rays of the pagan moon. “Thank you, Lucca,” he says, almost sharply but the boy does take it as the desperate dismissal that it was. Lucca steps closer, stands beside him looking out.

“I wish you would confide in me,” Lucca says, picking up his common refrain of the last week or so.

“You must stop asking, child. I will not.”

Lucca’s delicate white hands wring over the railing, they are all of Lucca that Matteo can allow himself to look at ( _not enough_ ). His voice is a little sharp when he says, “You should not call me ‘child’, Brother.”

He is right, to speak of him thus breaches rules. If Lucca were a child yet he would be in other quarters of the monastery, sequestered, and Matteo would not be able to see him save at prayer. Lucca is not a child, Lucca is a man ( _does that lessen the sin?_ Matteo has no answer) but still, Matteo cannot burden him with knowledge. 

Matteo has often been a teacher to Lucca; he dons that voice now. “ _Eo quod in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio; et qui addit scientiam, addit et laborem_.”

One of Lucca’s hands disappears from his view to grab his arm, holding on and shaking him a little. Warmth fans out from the site of the touch and Matteo can feel the bounds of his self-control heat and begin to burn.

“You mustn’t suffer alone. Even if God has abandoned us, Matteo, I will never abandon you!” Lucca is trying to turn him, so close now that the hems of their robes brush. Matteo can feel the warm puffs of air as he breathes, and like a gust of wind it blows the pillar of ash, all that remains of his weakened self-restraint, away.

Matteo turns his face to Lucca’s and lets himself see the boy and the dream all at once, throwing himself upon compounding sins in these his twilight hours. 

Lucca’s eyes shine in the moonlight, blue like nothing in the monastery is blue save a few of the jewels on St. Cuthbert. Tears threaten to spill from them. Matteo remembers that Lucca had been teary in the dreams, though not because Matteo would not spill his secrets; in the dreams the plague had never come to Rovarto. Rather, in the dreams, Lucca’s tears had come from sensation, from overwhelming emotion, from Matteo’s cock stuffed down his throat as he whimpered and swallowed. 

In the dreams, Lucca’s mouth had been feminine, diabolical, sinful. Here under the moon it is so, deep red and wet from his chewing it, but pulled in a line where Matteo remembers it otherwise. Those bitten lips at turns were stretched around Matteo, meeting his own hand as he enveloped Matteo’s length in deep, rich heat, or parted around a pink tongue that licked and laved at the tip and protruding vein. Matteo feels himself is leaking now just to think of the slickness, the sounds, his base flesh eager for the iniquity that his mind conjures. 

“Matteo?” 

The real Lucca’s voice sounds far off, it hardly breaks through the moans and gasps of the Lucca of Matteo’s dreams that fills up his skull to drown out all else. Matteo’s pulse thunders as he remembers in vivid detail the profane vision he had seen last night – more a single event than the flashes he had grown used to – when he had been able by a trick of his lurching, lustful brain at once to see from afar and to participate. 

In this dream, they had been talking, though his focus had been pulled too close to them to tell where in the monastery. And then they hadn’t been talking anymore. Wordlessly, Matteo had taken hold of Lucca, one hand grasping his shoulder and the fingers of the other sunk into the gold, curling hair that not even the tonsure could make any less than beautiful, and pushed him up against a wall. He had used the elbow of the arm the hand of which was in Lucca’s hair to press Lucca into the stone, as the other hand had tugged up the rough wool of his mantle, then the softer, thinner fabric of his tunic. He had used his own hips to keep the bundle above Lucca’s ivory buttocks as he groped and caressed them. All the while he remembers his seldom-used member filling and after a short smack to one of those unblemished rounds of skin – a smack that drew a high wail from Lucca – he had turned to scrabbling at his own wretched clothing to free it.

The fiery red of his cock in the dream had seemed more like the flesh of a demon than a man as it bobbed obscenely in the air before the pure alabaster of Lucca’s arse. He had Lucca gasp as he had freed his hand from Lucca’s hair so as to use both to spread his cheeks wide. After that it had seemed obvious that he should go between and so he had driven himself there, his aching cock trailing seed to slick its passage in the cleft of Lucca’s virgin arse.

From his dreamself’s outside perspective Matteo had seen Lucca’s red, glistening mouth open in shock and his face flood with heat as Matteo continued to grind forward, drawing choked moans out of him with every thrust as he squeezed Lucca’s buttocks around his cock. Matteo remembers the cacophony of harsh breathing, the filthy sounds of sliding and slapping, and how his own voice had twisted around grunts and groans; pitching lower with every drag of his iron over the sweetly furled rosebud that begged for its defilement. 

And in the dream, Matteo had succumbed easily. He had felt and seen himself withdraw from the welcome heat of Lucca to spit into one hand and slick his member with spit and the beads of seed that were by then flowing freely from his cockhead. With the other hand he had gathered more seed to rub around Lucca’s rose.

Then Lucca had whimpered as Matteo lined up and pressed the fat, throbbing head of him against that entrance that marked the last line to cross between him and the full sweetness of such carnal sin. Lucca had shouted when Matteo had breached him, had writhed and panted and moaned as Matteo’s hips had lurched forward, sinking his cock in up to the hilt.

In the dream Lucca had not spoken, had not begged as he does now or reached back to grasp and push at Matteo’s legs. He had been pliant, had let Matteo work at him until his balls had drawn up. Had let Matteo sin in him and then had stayed against that wall panting with his arse pushed out, red and raw and still so tempting. 

Now, Lucca struggles. 

“Matteo,” he is chanting. “Matteo let me go. I would let… but not like this.”

With a sickening jolt Matteo snaps out of his reverie, comes to his senses with his hands snarled in Lucca’s cowl and his fingertips — wet, with what had he slicked them? — pressing close to that very rose that he had taken in the dream. 

He drops his hands as if they held fire. He steps away until his back hits a stone pillar of the belfry. He drops to his knees, his half-filled member stinging hot beneath his cowl in the frigid cold up here.

“Forgive me, Lucca.” Matteo begs, his assailed heart in his throat. “ _Quoniam iniquitates meae supergressae sunt caput meum_. The Devil wrestled for my limbs and won. I am sorry.”

His eyes are cast in penitence down to the stones of the tower floor and so he cannot see Lucca, but he hears Lucca’s hiccoughing breaths as the boy steps close, kneels down to draw Matteo’s head up with a gentle hand that he does not deserve. 

Lucca’s sweet face swims in Matteo’s vision, blurred by guilty tears. “Matteo, I do.”

The mercy washes over him like a balm, and he is unworthy. “Why did you not pray to Saint Drausinus like I had told you to?” 

“You are the only one here that I don’t think of as a danger.”

Matteo hides his face in his hands. “Even now?” He asks. “Even after I almost—“

Lucca’s fingers close around his wrists and he pulls Matteo’s hands away. His cheeks are flushed a little, pink and shy.

“I would have shared that sin,” he confesses. “Had you been yourself. Just as I would share the burden of your knowledge.”

Matteo’s blood turns to ice in his veins. He quickly stands, brushing the light snowfall from his knees, and goes back to his place at the railings. “I will not.” 

Lucca’s face crumples, he starts to cry causing Matteo’s heart to ache as he says, wetly, “Why not? Why won’t you tell me? You’re just torturing yourself in our last days. Keeping secrets from me. Matteo, I lo—“

The creeping cold hardens his will, he had almost ruined Lucca tonight, had almost forced himself… He cannot sin any further. He says, sharp, “Go down to vespers, Lucca.”

Lucca sobs like he’s been struck. “Matteo, please.”

Matteo presses his eyes closed, tilts his face to the moon and imagines that he were a bird. Birds have no secrets, know no sin. “Go, Lucca. I will be down shortly,” he says, and he can justify the white lie but still he adds, “I’m sorry,” as Lucca storms away. 

The Devil can send fiery arrows to harass and to tempt men, but in giving in the sin is Matteo's alone.

 _Mea culpa_ , he thinks, he who is now truly bound for hell. _Mea culpa_.

**Author's Note:**

> (Content notes: the fic is heavy on Matteo's suicidal intent as it takes place just before he hurls himself off the tower, consent is never discussed in the context of Matteo's dreams and Lucca never speaks in them, then in a daze from his dreams Matteo sexually assaults Lucca but snaps out of it before actually entering or hurting Lucca, after that Lucca makes it clear that he would consent as he wants it, just not like that.) 
> 
> The Latin all comes from the vulgate bible: 
> 
> James 1:12-16 is
>
>> 12 Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been proved, he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love him.  
> 13 Let no man, when he is tempted, say that he is tempted by God. For God is not a tempter of evils, and he tempteth no man.  
> 14 But every man is tempted by his own concupiscence, being drawn away and allured.  
> 15 Then when concupiscence hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. But sin, when it is completed, begetteth death.  
> 16 Do not err, therefore, my dearest brethren.
> 
> and Matteo thinks James 1:12 above and then quotes Ecclesiastes 1:18:
>
>> 18 Because in much wisdom there is much indignation: and he that addeth knowledge, addeth also labour.
> 
> and finally 'Quoniam...' is the first part of line 5 of Psalm 37:
>
>> 5 For my iniquities are gone over my head: and as a heavy burden are become heavy upon me.


End file.
